Specialty goods and services may have distinctive features or information associated with an individual serving, unit, batch, or lot of a product that can add value to a transaction, and a consumer may be interested in knowing such specific information about a product they either purchased or are interested in purchasing. In the instance of food for example, a consumer may want to know various aspects of a food product, such as specific characteristics of the food product, origin of the food product, as well as who produced it, how it was produced, and information related to the seller of the food product.
Some companies may choose to make such product information freely available to customers. For example, some companies utilize barcodes or “best-by” dates as a way of allowing a consumer to retrieve information related to a product that has been, or will be, purchased. The consumer can scan the barcode (e.g., via a smartphone equipped with barcode scanner software) or enter the “best-by” date into a web site and receive product information related to the food product.
A problem with this approach is that the barcodes or best-by dates are normally applied at the point of production to every instance of a product, or to every instance produced at a given location or time, and the barcodes refer all such instances to the same body of information, i.e., the content being delivered is static and the same for every purchaser of the barcoded product. Due to the static nature of the barcoded product, sellers are unable to provide comprehensive and dynamic information related to a product at the point of sale or delivery in real-, or near real-, time.
Some companies have developed computing devices capable of recognizing objects, such that a user may simply place a product in contact with, or near, the device and in turn the device is configured to identify the object and further provide information (e.g., display text, images, videos, etc.) associated with the product. Such computing devices, however, generally rely on the detection of an identifier (e.g., barcode label or the like) associated with the product, wherein the identifier generally refers to a fixed body of information, i.e., the content being delivered is static and the same for every purchaser of the product. Thus, although some current interactive devices are able to recognize a product and display information associated with the product in a passive manner, the static nature of the identifier associated with the product still limits the ability of a seller to provide comprehensive and dynamic information related to a product at the point of sale or delivery in real-, or near real-, time.